Description
An emotionally rewarding trek through an uncanny, historic year from brilliant poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
With lyric panache and social emotions annealed together, DAYKEEPING exposes the mercurial feelings and stunned observations about the year 2020 with the amazing spectrum, characteristic of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s work, of poetry and essay-poem responses. Formally effervescent, emotionally mercurial, in a unique texture, DuPlessis responds to that first year of Covid lockdown with a stunning account of 2020’s crises and wounds. She repeatedly examines the “under-seen” and reveals its “under-scene.” Fixed in the interior exile of Covid’s narrow space, the poet struggles for a sense of sociality—questioning pronouns, historical events, dreams, and she chronicles her own responses. The book mixes dreams, chants, imprecations, analysis, outrages, sadness, and multiple interrogations in an abstract calendar mixing inner experience, and developing a personal, socio-political, racial, and quotidian archive. With her ethics of salvage and her haunted investigations, DuPlessis probes both the realist array and the hallucinatory unreality of the year 2020, with empathy, wit, self-questioning, and an ethical aesthetic. DAYKEEPING is a work of unmatched patterns, scintillating emotions, and dynamic responsiveness.
Poetry. Essay. Hybrid. History.
“'There are times you must stand where you are.' 2020 was the year each of us realized, in isolation, how entangled we are with our time and place, with our terrible and gorgeous histories, and with every other vulnerable human being on our planet. In the polyvocal text of DAYKEEPING, DuPlessis records our solitary and communal tragedies and terrors with 'implacable watchfulness, catalyzed syntax, attentive honesty and embodied thinking.' Here, through a variety of forms, encounters, illuminations, and examinations, she registers, brilliantly, a 'society in mourning, forlorn, orphaned and enraged beyond containment.'”
—Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Author Bio
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic and collagist who has written extensively on gender, poetry, and poetics, along with other social locations in texts. As a SELECTED POEMS 1980-2020, this volume from CHAX Press is a career survey of stylistic and thematic scope. Her work in poetry is centered by the multi-volume long poem Drafts, 114 cantos (1986-2012), whose range and intensities move from the cosmological to the granular, from joy to historical trauma. Her newest critical book A Long Essay on the Long Poem (University of Alabama Press, 2023) schematizes the purposes and poetics of long modes. Beyond the two collage works from Drafts, DuPlessis has also published the book-length collage poems Graphic Novella (2015), Numbers (2018), and Life in Handkerchiefs (2022). The collections of Traces, with Days, her twenty-first century serial poem in book- sized episodes, examine contemporary historical materials and the personal quotidian within the fine mesh of poetic discourses. DAYS AND WORKS, LATE WORK, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS, Poetic Realism, and Daykeeping, published from 2017 to 2023 are episodes in this current grouping. Her critical work is noted for a trilogy about gender and poetics, The Pink Guitar (1990, 2006), Blue Studios (2006), and Purple Passages (2012). She edited The Selected Letters of George Oppen and has commented variously on other poets in the Objectivist formation.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA